ANDREW Lovett will not pursue a case against a St Kilda player whose highly personal sledge against the Essendon forward was clearly audible on Channel Seven's coverage of Friday night's game.

While the offending St Kilda player could not be identified categorically, a voice was picked up on an umpire's microphone, saying, "You bash your f------ missus".

The insult was dished out in the middle of mass convergence of Saints and Bomber players just before the three-quarter-time break.

The Sunday Age believes that a senior Essendon official contacted Lovett about the incident yesterday and, after their conversation, felt sure that the player did not want to take the matter further.

The feeling from Essendon was that sledging, so long as it did not breach the AFL's racist and religious vilification code, was part of footy.

That was a view echoed by St Kilda's Justin Koschitzke. "I suppose if you are not discriminating with race and religion, I suppose everything else is a go," he said on Channel Ten's Before The Game.

Lovett was fined $500 by the Melbourne Magistrates Court last year after he was found guilty of breaking an intervention order taken out by his former girlfriend. He was ordered to stay away from her after she alleged he locked her in his car and hit her. Lovett pleaded guilty to breaking the intervention order after approaching his former partner at a bar in September 2006.

Umpire Michael Vozzo took no action during the skirmish or afterwards. An AFL spokesman said yesterday that if a complaint was going to be laid, it was up to Essendon to lodge it.

A Channel Seven spokesman last night confirmed the comments were aired through the umpire microphone but that the network had received no complaints.

Last year, Fremantle's Des Headland and West Coast's Adam Selwood went to the tribunal after Headland claimed that he struck Selwood after being provoked by the sexual references made about a tattoo on his arm. Unbeknown to Selwood, the tattoo was an image of Headland's six-year-old daughter.

An incident between former Bulldogs Tony Liberatore and Nathan Brown and Fraser Gehrig, when he was playing for the Eagles, was another rare instance in which an on-field sledge was made public.

After Gehrig was charged for striking an umpire, he revealed in the tribunal hearing that Liberatore and Brown had called him a rapist. Gehrig argued the insult had so enraged him that he lashed and accidentally connected with the umpire.

Gehrig was cleared, while Brown and Liberatore were fined $2000 each for using "abusive, insulting, threatening or obscene language".

With ADRIAN LOWE